When Palmerton native Noah Berlow was chosen last year to be the filmmaker to go into the studio with former Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash to document the recording of his second solo album, it came with a warning.

Slash in documentary of the making of his new album, 'Apocalyptic Love'

Berlow says the famous axman's representatives told him, "OK, this is Slash. He hates being on camera. He hates it when there's people in his face or whatever. He just is really paranoid about people talking to him.

"They gave me this huge sort of disclaimer and I was very prepared for that.

"And literally, the first day that I was in the rehearsal space, the first thing Slash does, he goes, 'Noah, hey listen, man, I know everybody and their mothers told you not to talk to me or whatever, but it's cool, man. You can talk.'"

That exchange started a relationship that lasted seven months, with daily filming of the writing, rehearsals and post-production of the album.

Noah Berlow

It produced so much fascinating film that the project expanded from being a series of webisodes into a 30-minute behind-the-scenes documentary that comes with the deluxe edition of the album, "Apocalyptic Love," released May22.

On the DVD, we see Slash, 46, whom Rolling Stone magazine last year ranked among the Top 50 guitarists of all time, and the band practicing, playing and interacting as the songs develop into the 15 cuts that made the deluxe edition.

Berlow says Slash and his band — lead singer Myles Kennedy, bassist Todd Kerns and drummer Brent Fitz — gave him unrestricted access to the studio during the stretch of seven- to nine-hour days, then later sat for additional interviews when the project shifted to a longer documentary.

"From the beginning, Slash and I, and also just the whole band, just clicked," Berlow says.

Efforts to reach Slash through his publicist were unsuccessful.

Berlow, 29, is a 2000 graduate of Palmerton Area High School and graduate of Ithaca College's Park School of Communications. Before he got the Slash gig he had worked as a documentary film editor for Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. He edited and produced the first music video from the album "Isolation" by Kennedy's band Alter Bridge and edited its "Live from Wembley" DVD, which went to No. 1 on http://www.Amazon.com.

He also made "The Journey to Avalon," an hourlong documentary on the making of Godsmack singer Sully Erna's first solo disc, "Avalon," in 2011.

Erna and Slash are signed to the same management company, which approached documentary co-director Daniel E. Catullo III about having a single cameraman follow Slash through the process. Catullo recommended Berlow, with whom he did the video for "Back From Cali," a song from Slash's self-titled debut solo disc in 2010.

Berlow says Slash's management said it was "really looking for the right person, who's not going to talk, who's going to be kind of a fly on the wall, and who's going to be able to do this sort of thing without a whole big production crew. We want a one-man show."

Berlow says he understood that direction, and actually likes to work that way.

"I do understand why they didn't want multiple camera people there, and that has a lot to do with [the fact that] they're writing a record — you need that creative space and everything like that," Berlow says.

"I stay as far away from the subject as possible and try to zoom in and just kind of give them their space … pretend like I'm not even in the room, to get a good documentary feel. You want it to be as live as possible. Sometimes when you have the camera on somebody, they might start to act goofy or they might get self-conscious. And I was a ghost, as much as possible."

The 'Apocalyptic Love' cover

But Berlow says he also didn't want to miss anything. So on the first day the band stepped into the Hollywood, Calif., studio in August, Berlow was with them.

"I brought lots of cameras and lots of tripods into the rehearsal space," he says. "And I was just crazy, setting up one camera and then running to another camera, setting up a second camera and then running to another camera … and then panning and doing shots."

Berlow says he would "move around, kind of hugging the walls so that they barely even noticed me. And what resulted was lot of different angles covering all instruments as they were rehearsing.

"And at the end of every day, Slash would thank me and say like, 'Noah, you're the only person I've ever been comfortable with shooting because I barely even notice that you were there,' " Berlow says.

He says he was never told anything was off limits, and the band got so comfortable, they would sometimes say things critical of some other musicians' work. "And then they'd turn around and they'd look at me and say, 'Oh, no!'" Berlow says, laughing.

He says Slash only made one demand the entire time. "I think I had one shot of him at his car, and his license plate was in the shot, and he said, 'Blur my license plate out and everything else is good.' He allowed me kind of full creative freedom to just be a one-man show."

Berlow says that on each webisode, he got management's approval on the first cut, with no changes.

Slash playing guitar in the DVD

But, he says, the recording process was so smooth, there were no drama to film anyway.

"That was one of the most rewarding parts of this whole thing," he says. "Sometimes when people are making a record, there's high pressure and the label needs it now, and they can never get it right. But Slash owns his own record label.

"When I watched them play and stuff, it felt like I was just watching a bunch of kids playing and having a good time. It really did not feel pressure at all and there was no sort of competition or egos or anything. Everyone was just very happy to be playing with Slash, and Slash was allowing all the different players to give their input."

Berlow says he tried to reflect that in the documentary. "I tried to show each player as a valuable piece of the band, and that's how Slash felt about this group."

He says he also tried to reflect the album's approach, which was to record essentially live, with all the musicians in the studio. He wanted to give the footage "that '70 vibe — hand made, scratches on the film, to make it feel real and raw and authentic."

Berlow says that after a few of the webisodes, he was getting so much footage that he left another worker to man the cameras in the studio while he concentrated on "the producer/director side and start to edit this stuff together, 'cause they needed to be put out kind of in real time.

"And then after I would look at all the footage, I would conduct all the interviews of the band to get what we needed." He says that process continued "up to the last second of the record — before it went to manufacturing in March."

Along the way, the idea of a "making-of" DVD was suggested, and Berlow says he formulated footage. But there was no formal decision until, "about five days before they needed it. It was a very last-minute decision."

The songs weren't even finished so Berlow says he asked for them "before they were properly mixed."

"In those five days that I had to make this documentary with nearly 5 terabytes of media …. I slept maybe 20 minutes a day for those five days that it took to finish it," Berlow says.

The night before it was due, the camera man was still with the band, filming rehearsal, and told Slash "that I had been staying up five days straight to make this documentary."

"I received an e-mail from Slash, thanking me, like, 'Wow, bravo, really love what you're doing,'" Berlow says. "And my first response was, 'Hey, Slash, we're missing a few sound bites. Can we get another interview?'" It's the interview you see at the end of the DVD, Berlow says.

Berlow says the webisodes and DVD "only kind of scratched the surface" of footage he has, which would easily be enough for a feature documentary.

Berlow knows about feature documentaries. In April, "Kumpania: Flamenco Los Angeles," a film about the gypsy flamenco dance scene, he did with director Katina Dunn and cinematographer Avi Cohen, won Best Documentary at the Memphis International Film Festival and the Audience Award at the Buffalo Film Festival in April.

"You can try to plan for how you can envision the story going into it, but you really can't predict," Berlow says. "You just kind of have to be patient and let the story happen and just pay attention to it."

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JOHN J. MOSER has been around long enough to have seen the original Ramones in a small club in New Jersey, U2 from the fourth row of a theater and Bob Dylan's born-again tours. But he also has the number for All-American Rejects' Nick Wheeler on his cell phone, wrote the first story ever done on Jack's Mannequin and hung out in Wiz Khalifa's hotel room.

OTHER CONTRIBUTORS

JODI DUCKETT: As The Morning Call's assistant features editor responsible for entertainment, she spends a lot of time surveying the music landscape and sizing up the Valley's festivals and club scene. She's no expert, but enjoys it all — especially artists who resonated in her younger years, such as Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Tracy Chapman, Santana and Joni Mitchell.

KATHY LAUER-WILLIAMS enjoys all types of music, from roots rock and folk to classical and opera. Music has been a constant backdrop to her life since she first sat on the steps listening to her mother’s Broadway LPs when she was 2. Since becoming a mother herself, she has become well-versed on the growing genre of kindie rock and, with her son in tow, can boast she has seen a majority of the current kid’s performers from Dan Zanes to They Might Be Giants.

STEPHANIE SIGAFOOS: A Jersey native raised in Northeast PA, she was reared in a house littered with 8-tracks, 45s and cassette tapes of The Beatles, Elvis, Meatloaf and Billy Joel. She also grew up on the sounds of Reba McEntire, Garth Brooks and Tim McGraw and can be found traversing the countryside in search of the sounds of a steel guitar. A fan of today's 'new country,' she digs mainstream/country-pop crossovers like Lady Antebellum and Sugarland and other artists that illustrate the genre's diversity.